The Ultimate Precondition (Laughing at It) / Diedrich Diederichsen Tony Conrad’s contribution to the arts of the than advancing like a slowly widening river, twentieth and twenty-first centuries does they cut through the density of the decades, not consist of many elaborate, room-filling, ages, and periods like bundles of rays and time-consuming works that require a great generate epiphanies. They draw themselves in deal of reception time, storage space, or even and are thin, like projectiles; they are very close prior knowledge. And yet they are so funda- to being completely immaterial, and yet they mental that they generate more thought time are massively preoccupied with bodies, their than the work of artists who are demanding weight, and the conditions in which they live. in the former sense. Although they relate to Perhaps in part because they are so swift and artistic formats, genres, and tools—music, film, lean, Branden W. Joseph has organized his nar- painting, installation, musical instruments, rative of Conrad’s work3 around the Deleuzian projectors, light, amplification, etc.—his works notion of the “minor” artist. Conrad did not were rarely curated, administered, interpreted, produce his pieces from a position of power or stored by established institutions in almost and authority, from the pedestal of the work. any period of his life. But his anarchism was not, as is so often the By thought time I do not mean merely the case with anarchists, another word for a lack of length of time some pieces take: consider, for concentration; it found its artistic equivalent in example, the Yellow Movies, 1972–73 (figs. a fundamental questioning, a critique of art in 56–59). For each of these works, Conrad out- the most fundamental sense of the term. lined a movie screen with black brushstrokes Artistic practice is work that reconstructs on a large sheet of paper and then filled it human activity starting from its basic precon- in with cheap paint, the gradual yellowing ditions. One could, for example, with Kant, of which he regarded as a film—a very long view these basic conditions—the a prioris—as one, of course. What is telling here is that the space and time; with Lessing, the imperatives point is not to watch the yellowing process but addressed to the artists in this direction have rather to think it—but to do so on the basis of already been developed. It is no coincidence the fact that it is actually happening. Nor do I that in the decades preceding Conrad’s early simply have in mind the very long drones that activities in the United States, a “Newer he played in the early 1960s with the Theatre Laocoön” was envisioned,4 whose author, of Eternal Music, which he preferred to call Clement Greenberg, attempted to reformulate the Dream Syndicate—hardly anyone actually for modernism the old order that Lessing had heard them. We know more or less how they established in the eighteenth century by dif- may have sounded, but above all we think ferentiating between the spatial and temporal them; we think their length.1 But thought time arts.5 This reformulation ultimately gave rise refers not just to the time in which we think to the quintessential and now all-too-familiar but also to the thinking of time. Nor would that modernist demand for medium specificity, mean simply, in the case of Conrad, the notion which in essence was already expressed by of an endless aesthetic experience—endless Lessing, and which calls for artworks to do because it is always there to be sampled afresh everything they can transparently do with and and reflected on—but also the concrete idea say about their medium—but to avoid perform- of the surpassing of all lived experience by ing magic or creating illusions. permanent (technical) recordings. In a video Yet in the blind spot of this modernism, two that Conrad wished to have released only after new, fundamental, and closely related condi- his death, he talks about the idea of speaking tions of the arts have emerged. For these to be from beyond the grave with an audience of the elevated to the status of a prioris as well, the as yet unborn.2 concept would have to be expanded some- But we do not think about the durations and what. If the a priori is classically a precondition surpassings of the experienceable the same for thinking and imagining anything at all that way we do exciting, mysterious, and inscru- is capable of giving rise to a valid judgment, we table formulas and symbols. We think them, can also speak, with Michel Foucault, of a “his- effectively, with our senses; they exercise an torical a priori” that describes the “condition[s] imagination harnessed to the senses. Yet they of reality” of statements.6 With this concept, the also brush up against what Kant called the political and social preconditions are so closely mathematical sublime, that is, the surpassing linked to the technical and medial ones that of the imagination within precise mathematical technological developments do not just consti- categories—but more on that later. tute conditions secondarily, when implemented No, these ideas have not gathered dust in as part of the production process. In my view, museum storerooms, nor have they motivated however—and this is especially true of the the many dissertations that will take up space arts—this idea implies a second important pre- and gather dust in turn. They are nimble ideas condition, at least for all the arts that work with and at the same time much too basic to spread recording technologies, and only then becomes Fig. 19. Conrad in a classroom, date unknown. 38 39 out and take up large amounts of space. Rather fully operative. For in these arts, the reference to reality is no longer primarily diegetic and projects themselves, which do not adhere to aggressive, very physical, and very male artist period in particular, to which I referred at the symbolic (temporal: a succession of conven- any style or genre or even to what the dis- versus patient material. Conrad also conducted beginning of this essay. The notion that when tional signs) or mimetic and iconic (a resem- course of the art world today would call a posi- aggressive assaults like these on the physical light falls on celluloid or photographic paper, blance deployed in space or on a surface) but tion—from the mathematician and philosopher film, except that in his case they were much when stampers are cut, and when grooves punctual and indexical. The twentieth century Henry Flynt to the founder of queer cinema and more complex.8 The point of applying this rep- are pressed into lumps of vinyl, it constitutes is distinguished by direct transmission from theater, Jack Smith, from Mike Kelley to Tony ertoire of attitudes and gestures to film, which a brute, undirected influencing of matter by reality, recorded and initially uninterpreted Oursler, John Cale, Marian Zazeela, La Monte wasn’t normally exposed to such hands-on, other matter, and that the appearance of legible impressions caused by living persons. These Young, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and Uwe direct interventions (which were not unlike the semantics and its units, such as meaning, con- sensations caused by photographs, films, and Nettelbeck/Faust. And there are many others later scratching of records in hip-hop) was to tent, images, or chords, is just a special case sound recordings are no longer subject in the as well. Conrad often talked about how in early align the new medium with the old, so that the of that phenomenon, represents an important same degree to artistic influence and deter- 1960s Manhattan, just a few blocks apart, one critical, anti-illusionist gesture did not need to starting point for Conrad. For him, the vast, mination by a purposeful artistic project that could find the completely independent and change much. entropic waters of dull materiality in which the approaches and approximates the external sur- original planets, even universes, of Jack Smith However, Conrad soon began to take a fun- fragile dinghy of sense cognition is bobbing face of the world as mimesis. Since the advent and La Monte Young, and how despite a few damentally different approach. For example, by are a meaning, an object of fascination—but of photography and phonography, there has personal encounters and discussions they were cooking and seasoning film and finally by pick- one that can no longer be painted or evoked in always been a snapshot at the heart of every able to evolve independently of each other in ling it like cucumbers or gherkins, he not only literary language like the experience of natural project; the punctum governs a central part all of their radicalism. parodied the simple, para-iconoclastic gesture beauty or the sublime in classical art, with its of every act of reception, and with it, magic: But Conrad went a step further than his of many experimental filmmakers, which in human-piloted, pre-mechanical, and pre-techni- the radical and instantaneous conjuring up of many collaborators. He did not remain wedded any event did not bear frequent repeating. He cal procedures of writing and painting. an absent person, often one who has already to just one of these radical worlds but spent also exposed it to a different practice that was In The Flicker, 1966, or in the drones that died, within a present order—usually that of the time in all of them, bringing each of them to a frugal and domestic rather than artistic and Conrad repeatedly performed and rethought, image, music, or the narrative arts.